Welcome to Essence of Champagne!

This site is designed to be your digital guidebook to the world of Champagne. It provides you with all champagne essentials from styles and types to vintage assessment and tips for visiting the region.

As a member, you will have access to a wide and ever-expanding range of tasting notes. Every year Essi Avellan tastes over 1,500 champagnes, both current releases and historical vintages, making this database the most up-to-date source of champagne reviews. She is involved in Champagne and Sparkling Wine World Championships, FINE Magazine’s annual classification of champagnes as well as the champagne panels for the World of Fine Wine, which enables her to regularly blind-taste and evaluate champagnes in rare width and rigour. Her qualifications, such as winning the Institute of Masters of Wine’s best taster’s Madame Bollinger Medal in 2006, and her 10-year specialization in champagne make Avellan’s palate highly reliable in champagne assessment.

In the future, the Members Only section will be updated with producer profiles. Today, the site contains tasting notes from around 100 producers, totalling over 2,000 champagne tasting notes. We are in the process of reviewing and compiling Avellan’s vast library of notes, and we will add new producers one by one over the course of 2017 and 2018.